Window Shopping
by Aeanagwen
Summary: While they wait for Orga and the others to get out of their meeting with the boss of Teiwaz, Dante drags Akihiro and Chad out to explore the Saisei shopping district.


"People are staring."

"So what? They stared at the spaceport, too."

"No, they didn't."

"Wha—yes, they did. _Loads_ of them—"

Walking a few paces ahead of the argument, Akihiro closed his eyes and stopped. With long-practiced attunement, the two behind him fanned out a few steps before stopping as well, their voices instantly silenced. Akihiro turned to face them.

"People at the spaceport weren't staring," he told Dante, short and blunt. "They looked until they saw we were with someone who wasn't Human Debris, then went back to what they were doing. They're staring _now_ because we're out without an owner."

Chad nodded grave agreement. Dante opened his mouth to protest, but Akihiro turned to Chad and went on.

"We don't have one, so it doesn't matter what they think. Tekkadan is here with the Turbines. If Tekkadan is allowed to look around, so are we."

Chad stared at him, then looked down, a wan smile pulling itself over his face with effort. "So you changed your mind, then."

Dante's grin hovering at the edge of his vision, Akihiro shrugged. He hadn't wanted to accompany Dante on a "shopping trip" when none of them had a galar to their names, but Dante had made it clear that he'd go on his own if he had to, and for all the truth in Akihiro's words to Chad, one of them out alone was still asking for trouble. You heard stories, living like they did—some kid bought by an okay owner, out running an errand, gets kidnapped _again,_ and the new owner's much worse—and Orga had too much riding on this job to come looking for one missing red-stripe.

Anyway, it _was_ true that they had every right to explore Saisei's shopping district. True and still electric to think about: a thought too big to hold in one brain, tingling and hazardous. He wanted to relish in it, force people to see it—so better to go as a group.

"We decided to do it," was all he said aloud. "I'm not going back on it just because there's staring."

Dante eased over to Chad and elbowed him. "What Akihiro said. C'mon, lighten up. Sure we can't buy anything yet, but we can imagine it, right?" He gestured broadly at the storefronts around them—stores with clothes in the windows, men's and women's alike, or ones with a few carefully placed electronic devices, jewelry stores, ones with paintings and sculptures like Maruba had kept in his office before Orga moved in, and, scattered in throughout, restaurants and snack shops and endless other things Akihiro hadn't been around since he was very, very young.

"Akihiro!"

Akihiro startled, looking back over at Dante, who was staring at him meaningfully.

"Yeah?"

"What are _you_ gonna get with your very first paycheck?" Dante grinned expectantly, hands shoved in his pockets. Chad mirrored the gaze, his arms folded—a little defensively, to Akihiro's eye—over his chest.

Akihiro stared back at them, blinking. The thought hadn't really even crossed his mind. Sure, Orga had been paying all the guys who left, but as for the ones who stayed—well, it wasn't that Akihiro doubted Orga's intentions, but he'd believe he was getting paid for all this when there was money in his hand, and even then, he wasn't sure he was going to be able to take it gracefully.

"What am I—getting…?"

"That's what I said. Me, I want a data slate of my own." Dante jerked a thumb at a man in a business suit striding through the district, eyes glued to a data slate and flicking through it with one hand. Unlike Tekkadan's clunky, drably-colored devices, this one was sleek and black, a reflection of Saisei's ceiling lights bobbing across the back of its glossy surface in time with its owner's steps. "So I can put stuff on it to read when I get bored in downtime."

"You could train more in downtime," Chad pointed out.

"Says the guy who's always sitting around the bridge these days," Dante teased, and the two of them resumed their debate. Akihiro cast his eyes upward, holding back a sigh, and started walking again.

The three of them wandered through the district, pausing whenever Dante found something else he wanted to look at, though Akihiro caught his arm the one time he looked ready to head inside a store.

"Don't bother them in there unless you can back it up with money," he rebuked, and Dante sighed heavily, but stayed outside, staring at the display of video screens so closely Akihiro could see his breath fogging faintly at the glass.

"Akihiro," Chad mumbled, staring fixedly at the window. "Trouble."

Akihiro stepped up behind him and followed his stare. Reflected in the glass was the last store they'd lingered at, now with two people standing outside the door, heads turned in his trio's direction. Both of them were men, one with a badge clipped to his shirt that matched the storefront's logo, one in Saisei's security's dark pressed suit.

Akihiro turned to face them head-on, meeting first the employee's eyes—the man jumped a bit when Akihiro's gaze caught his own and didn't instantly, defensively slide away—then the security guard's. Keenly aware of Dante straightening up behind him, Akihiro put one hand on Chad's shoulder, which had gone curved and stiff with tension. The guard held his stare for a long moment, then looked down at the white emblem on the back of Chad's jacket. He held up a data slate of his own and tapped it a few times, keeping an eye on Akihiro the whole time, but eventually focused in on the screen. He turned it around to show the employee whatever it was he was looking at, and shrugged, shifting his position to put more of his back towards Akihiro.

"He must have looked us up." Relaxing, Akihiro turned back to the other two. "It's like I said," he added to Chad, "we've got every right to be here."

"Damn straight," Dante said, unclenching the fists he'd balled up at his sides, and nodded, vicious and a bit shaken. "Anyway. First paycheck. Something electronic. I want something I can personalize—like put decals on and stuff. What about you two?"

The three of them continued on in unspoken agreement, and Akihiro mulled it over. He didn't have much use for personal things. Maybe exercise equipment? The First Division guys had had a gym the Third Division hadn't been allowed anywhere near, much less the Human Debris. But if they were going to be running errands like this as their new jobs, most of that stuff probably wasn't very portable, was it? And then it'd just end up sitting around the old CGS building while he was in a star ship millions of miles away.

"Do you really think we're going to get paid for this?" Chad was asking, echoing Akihiro's earlier thoughts. "We've got to be at the bottom of the list, right?"

"We're in the employee roster like everyone else," Dante countered. "I checked. Our names aren't flagged or anything. Come on," he insisted. "Just pick something. Go wild! We're going to Earth; they got _everything_ there."

Chad hummed, walking along and staring at his feet, his usual frown drawing its usual line in his brow.

"Some kind of food," he said finally, looking up at of a corner grocery as they passed it. The smell of baking bread wafted out of the door, and small tables and chairs filled a little fenced-in area around its window; a few people sat at the tables eating. "Something you can't get on Mars."

"Food?" Dante echoed, disappointed. "But you'll eat it and it'll be gone. What a waste of money."

Chad shrugged. "I'll still have the memory of it," he reasoned. "That's something nobody can steal from me, if worst comes to worst."

Akihiro looked at them askance, frowning to himself. Dante, who scratched his initials on the undersides of benches and on the tops of entrance bay doors, just to remind himself that he was there, existing, when things got bad. Chad, who would sit in a corner and get lost inside his head for hours on end if he didn't have something to occupy his time. They all had something like that—Dante and Chad, Casimir, Gatt, even Akihiro himself, if he was honest about it. That gnawing sense of impermanence, of being adrift in space no matter where they were.

"I mean, what good's a data slate going to be if we all wind up captured by Gjallarhorn?" Chad was saying, into Dante's expression of total affront.

"A house," Akihiro said aloud, and looked away when the two of them fell silent and turned to look at him.

"What?"

"Where?"

Akihiro pushed his hands into his pockets, back turned to the both of them. "I'd probably have to save up for it," he went on. "But that's what I'd want. Somewhere for us to go when we get off work that's not just back to the barracks."

"Us…?" Chad echoed, because of course he'd caught the wording, and Dante was laughing, unashamed and open.

"You're such a softie, Akihiro. Do Orga and them know?"

Aware of the faint heat in his cheeks, Akihiro sped up his pace. "We should head back," he said, brusque. "Orga said to be back onboard by sixteen hundred hours."

Dante went on laughing, catching up to walk level with Akihiro, grinning at him with an air of affection Akihiro didn't even need to look at fully to see. Chad, too, fell in behind him, and his softer huff of amusement brought a reluctant smile to the edge of Akihiro's mouth, one he staunchly avoided showing either of them by keeping his head turned firmly to the side.

All three of them together, they headed back to the Isaribi.


End file.
